Howard Stern has proven irreplaceable on radio

Radio hosting is a fluid business in which most hosts, to be blunt, are considered replaceable.

But a few are not. While a thousand people read news on the radio, no one will replace Paul Harvey, who died last month.

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Similarly, the arrival of the new top-40 station "92.3 Now" is in a sense final proof that no one has figured out how to replace Howard Stern and what he did over 20 years on terrestrial radio.

Stern's on Sirius XM satellite radio these days, in the fourth year of a five-year deal. He says he loves it, though he's less in the daily conversation. He also says he doesn't know what he'll do when his contract expires. It's safe to say he can do pretty much whatever he wants - and that too reflects how much he accomplished on "regular" radio.

It was a lot more than that at his flagship, WXRK (92.3 FM) in New York. The last couple of years Stern was there, WXRK collected more than $50 million in ad revenue, and finance people said about 75% was from Stern.

Mornings are radio's big earning time anyway, but in this case, WXRK's rock format the rest of the day had maybe a quarter of Stern's audience.

When Stern left, Hollander and CBS tried to replace him by committee on his several dozen stations. They hired David Lee Roth for New York and other cities, Adam Carolla for Los Angeles and so on.

They also changed the format of WXRK, turning it into hot-talk "Free-FM."

Roth, one of radio's all-time debacles, was soon replaced with Opie and Anthony, who at one time were seen as the next Stern. That didn't work out. They did well with young men, but didn't get the broader audience and are now just on satellite.